Notices by emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social), page 3

We have to have something better to do with our time.

Like I’m glad people aren’t playing the game and the spoilers thing is ? praxis, but I don’t think the boycott is going to affect her royalties in any noticeable way, at all.

The details of her deal are private, but most of the time royalties are paid as an advance. This has the effect of 1) hedging for the IP holder by providing a guaranteed income and 2) creating some buy-in for the developer to respect the IP.

The advance is earned out at a rate proportional to the royalties, and no further money is paid until that happens.

In other words, she’s probably already received most, if not all, the money this game will make.

More people playing (paying) does earn out the advance faster, but the advance is basically game theory.

The publisher wants it small, in case the game/book/whatever doesn’t sell, and the IP holder wants it big, for the same reason.

For most cases, like for a first-time author, the publisher usually holds the power. But that dynamic reverses when you have a big famous IP. The IP holder is incentivized to hold out for a big advance, only making it smaller if it risks not selling at all.

So if I were a betting woman, I would bet that Rowling’s advance is all the money she’ll get from the game (games have very limited shelf lives typically, which also incentivizes Rowling to push for a larger advance).

A boycott might hurt the developer, which is fair, if you want to hurt the developer. It may also lead to a reverse boycott, because the primary conservative viewpoint is “hurt people I don’t like.”

The thing about civility is this: civility is great when you are discussing tax policy or whether the trim should be painted blue or grey. Civility is deadly when discussing whether human beings are to be afforded equal dignity.

In Charlottesville in 2017, in the leadup to Unite the Right, a certain kind of person was obsessed with civility. This person, liberal, white, and smarter than you, was convinced they knew how to take down hate.

We had every manner of civility politics. We had people say they were going to silently surround the Nazis, turn their backs, and join hands in a moving display of love over hate. We had people saying that both sides were bad. One city councillor called an anti-racist group a terrorist organization. The term “cville” was turned inti “cvilleity” more than once.

In the end, this did not stop hate.

It did, however, silence and imprison anti-racist activists who were trying to stop hate.

More than once, civility was used as a dogwhistle to silence Black people for being “too loud” and “too aggressive.” It was a racist policy supported by a bunch of racist community members almost all of whom were blue through and through.

Civility was a weapon that supported hate.

After Unite the Right, the first thing we attacked as a community was civility. The next city council meeting, one of the councillors tried to have a discussion about Land Use policies. No, we weren’t going back to business as usual. We were going to murder civility on the dais.

We took over that meeting. We ran the council off the floor and into a television closet. We stood on the dais. When cops tried to control us we pushed them back. We refused to leave. We demanded to be heard.

Would you like to see my DMs with Jack Dorsey after the takeover?

Here you are

TERFs are like TRAs this, TRAs that, but it was the original URL for Experts Exchange that really made me trans.

One thing about intensively studying other languages is it strikes me how large the gap is in English between the spoken and the written language, and even in the written language, the large gaps between different styles of writing.